Palladian Days (15 page)

As time passes, I am frustrated to see that Carl understands more and more of what is being said, but without increasing at all the amount of talking that he does. There may be an implied suggestion in the air that he would talk more if only I would talk less, but I choose not to explore it. In fact, Carl blithely buys books in Italian and marches his way through them if the index makes any reference to the Cornaro family. His Italian improves dramatically if he has a book in his hand describing Elena Lucrezia Cornaro or any other Cornaro.

So why can't he talk on the telephone?

“Un attimo, per favore. Mia moglie parla Italiano piu bene
. One moment please. My wife speaks Italian more well.”

That emerges as Carl's telephone mantra, accompanied by extending the handset at arm's length in my direction.
Note to diary: I'm grateful to find one thorn to prove I'm surrounded by roses
.

“Signora Sally, do you have another bucket? Maybe a large plastic bowl?”

Rain slashes at the villa. Giacomo has dashed over from Caffe Palladio to help me close the
balcone
and protect the villa's windows.

“A bucket?” I ask. “Did something spill?”

“There's another leak in the roof, Signora Sally.
L'acqua entra come un fiume
. Water's coming in like a river,” he answers. “We must place a bucket to protect the rug and the floor.”

I think there is a bucket in the
cantina
, but to save time I empty a large plastic wastebasket and hand it to Giacomo. Giacomo bounds up the spiral wooden stairs, with me following as closely as I can manage. I'm anxious to see the new waterway that has opened on the second floor. A steady thread of rainwater cascades from the ceiling twenty-seven feet above our heads and splashes at our feet in the midst of a puddle that is widening rapidly across the terrazzo floor.

The emergency contained, Giacomo begins to plan ahead. “You must telephone Ilario to come tomorrow.”

Ilario, I learn, has the skill and the daring to climb into the rafters over the upstairs grand salon and find the source of the leak. Sometimes he can jiggle the
tegole
(roof tiles) from the underside and cure the problem. Other times he simply leaves a bucket permanently in place in the rafters beneath the leak. There's been a problem for years, I'm told, but the appearance of new leaks has accelerated over the past winter. There seems to be another after every storm, Giacomo reports sadly.

When Carl arrives the following week I update him on what I have learned about the roof. The lines on his brow deepen visibly.

“Not a new roof!” he groans. His worry lines get even worse when I tell him that, in order to repair the latest gusher, Ilario on the following day walked out onto the sloping roof of the bedroom wing—fifty feet above the ground—to remove a pocket of accumulated dirt that seemed to have attracted its own garden of weeds and one small shrub.

“He has been doing it for several years now,” Giacomo confirms. “Signor Rush had an insurance policy on Ilario's life, so there would be something for his widow in case he fell and was killed.”

Carl collapses into a kitchen chair. His lawyer's mind has simply seized up at the implications of it all. I comfort him with a few meaningless phrases of encouragement and hope. His color returns as, in his typical fashion, he mentally sorts through what we must do.

“Ilario must never,
never
go onto the roof without a safety line,” Carl begins, his Italian—aided by even more eloquent pantomime—rising to the occasion.

“Ilario won't wear a safety rope,” Giacomo advises. “He says he knows what he's doing and is careful so he won't fall.”

Carl repeats himself. No one is to go on the roof without a safety line. If Ilario won't wear one, we'll have to find someone else; if we can't find someone else, we'll just have to buy bigger buckets and more mops. Later, when we discuss the roof problem with Ilario, he agrees to follow Carl's required precaution.

Next we examine our options with the roof. Ernesto Formentin, the local
geometra
—survey engineer—whose daughter Nella played the harp at the Rushes’ final reception, is familiar with the villa and has our confidence. He believes that the current roof was installed, or at least substantially renovated, in the late 1940s, just after World War II. That makes the roof about fifty years old. Over time, he tells us, there is a general buildup of dirt and decomposed leaves. Seeds of weeds and small bushes find the soil and germinate. Moss and mildew flourish as well. Their presence begins to obstruct the natural flow of rainwater, causing the water to back up like Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam. Soon the water is pouring over the uphill ends of the
tegole
. Hailstones can break tiles as well. So can fallen tree limbs, although that's less of an issue with the villa because it is taller than most surrounding trees.

After fifty years, continual problems are to be expected, Ernesto says. We might postpone installing a new roof, but it will be necessary within the next few years in any event.

Given a choice between spending money now and spending it
later, Carl and I generally opt for later. Moreover, while we are still trying to digest the cost of my magnificent new kitchen, it is especially important that we hold off on major expenses for as long as possible. We are acutely aware of the fact that Carl is not receiving a paycheck now. In this case, however, because of the safety issues, we decide to move ahead right away. Neither of us wants Ilario out on the roof—with or without a safety line.

“Right away” proves to be a more flexible concept than we imagined.

Nothing can be done without permission from the Soprinten-dente di Belle Arti in Venice. Villa Cornaro is a registered national monument in Italy, as well as one of about five hundred monuments on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Prior approval of the Soprintendente is required before any construction is undertaken at the villa, even a project that would seem like ordinary maintenance, such as repair or replacement of the roof. Ernesto prepares the formal application, complete with amazingly detailed drawings and specifications of the project. We've heard tales of mindless delays at the hands of the Soprintendente's office, so we prepare for a long wait.

A short while later, Ernesto surprises us with news that the Soprintendente himself wishes to pay us a visit and inspect the villa personally. The matter of a new roof is something that would never ordinarily rise to the level of receiving the Soprintendente's personal attention. The current Soprintendente, however, is rather new in his office; perhaps he has simply decided to acquaint himself with one of the prominent structures under his jurisdiction.

The Soprintendente is charming. He makes an immediate friend of Carl by speaking English with him. We are both impressed by his
genuine interest in the smallest details of the villa, since we are obsessed with them ourselves.

He cheerfully explores the
cantina
with us, where we discuss the pros and cons of whitewashing its walls every spring to hide the blotches of mildew that build up during the winter. Dick Rush was a confirmed whitewasher, but Carl and I decided at the outset that we preferred to have a more natural look in the
cantina
, whose vaulted bays had been filled with winemaking casks until the church acquired the property in 1951. We suspended the annual whitewashing. Now the accumulated layers of whitewash are beginning to flake away and the deep red of the original brick is emerging.

“Much healthier without the whitewash,” the Soprintendente assures us. “It allows the bricks to breathe.”

He saves his greatest enthusiasm for the villa's graffiti. Like all of Palladio's villas, Villa Cornaro is built of brick, not stone. But the brick is covered with a pale, mellow-toned stucco or plaster
intonaco
that is scored to create the look of Istrian stone. Villa Cornaro is the only one of Palladio's villas to retain its original
intonaco
, so Palladio's original conception of the proper color for a villa has been preserved. The
intonaco
of Palladio's villas, once lost, is virtually impossible to reproduce because its appearance does not come from pigment; the
intonaco
is a mixture of sand, ground glass, and marble bits, along with who knows what else, that defies attempts to reproduce the luminous glow that it radiates in sunlight.

Preservation of the original
intonaco
at Villa Cornaro has also preserved remarkable tokens of life in the Cornaro family in the seventeenth century: the villa, especially on the more protected south facade, is covered with dozens of graffiti. Most of them record family news items.

Here's another:

One notation is chilling even after three hundred years:

Sally explains to visitors some graffiti on the south portico

“Incredibile!”
the Soprintendente exclaims. He bounces excitedly from one graffito to another. “Has anyone written about this?” he asks.

“There's nothing that we know of,” I reply.

We show him the earliest dated one: 1608. Not completely legible, it seems to record the election of a Cornaro son to the Grand Council.

“Incredibile!”
he continues to exclaim at regular intervals. Together we marvel that the family was writing on the walls of its proud villa less than twenty years after the final touches were put on it. Would other Palladian villas display such memoirs of villa life if their
intonaco
had not been lost?

The second marvel is that something written outdoors in the same period that the
Mayflower
landed at Plymouth Rock has remained legible today.

“This is written in
sanguigna,”
the Soprintendente concludes. His nose is practically touching the writing as he examines it. “It's an old writing medium made of a compound that includes ox-blood. That's what gives it that reddish color.” We speculate that maybe there has been a chemical bonding between the writing medium and the wall surface. That might explain the survival of the graffiti.

There is more writing on the walls in the attic. Some of it records how many sacks of grain were stored in different rooms in particular years in the seventeenth century. Then there are fanciful drawings of ducks, of dragons, of the villa itself, of young dandies with plumed hats and period shoes. Another room has scribbles by soldiers billeted there in World War I. The walls of the attic are like a scrapbook of the villa's life.

Before the Soprintendente leaves, Carl springs on him a new subject. Since we first bought the villa, Carl has cast a baleful eye on two rows of six cypress trees running in parallel lines down the center of the park from the south steps of the villa. Carl objects that the trees block the view of the villa from the south and that the problem will get worse as the trees—now about twelve feet tall— continue to grow.

The Soprintendente agrees with Carl. By fall, the trees are history, uprooted by Ilario's hardy tractor.

• • •

In June we have lunch with Douglas Lewis in a busy restaurant near his office at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Carl, with satisfaction, tells Doug what he plans with the cypresses. Doug bursts into loud laughter, tinged perhaps with a certain air of relief.

“I did the same thing!” he exclaims. “When I was writing my book about the villa, back in 1975, Dick and Julie kindly allowed me to stay at the villa. They weren't there. They said I should feel free to do whatever work I thought was in the best interest of the villa.”

Doug pauses for effect. “So I had those same cypresses pulled out. They didn't belong there at all. Well, Julie was furious when she found out about it. Seems she planted them herself and loved them.”

“But they are still there,” I object.

“That's just it,” Doug says, laughing again. “Julie replanted them! What you are taking out are her replacements.”

Carl and I smile at each other. A good day's work, we are thinking.

“I'm so pleased they're gone,” Doug adds.

Permission to redo the roof arrives in the fall. With trepidation, we set about finding an
impresa
(contractor) for the work.